The Friends donated to the Waterford Museum of Treasures, at their request, two large architectural drawings attributed to James Gandon, the architect of the Four Courts and the Custom House, Dublin. They show the plan of New Geneva, the proposed Swiss Huguenot settlement at Passage East, County Waterford, in 1780. In the event the project came to nothing owing to the disturbed state of the country, the Swiss left and today there is little to recall New Geneva other than the memory of the sad role its military barracks played in the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, evoked in the well known ballad ‘The Croppy Boy’. The drawings will feature in a forthcoming exhibition about New Geneva and the Huguenots at the Waterford Museum of Treasures.
